Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2007 14:59:40 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>, perex@suse.cz, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [-mm patch] unexport sys_{open,read}
Message-Id: <20070909145940.0b41c8a5.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070909203920.GA11764@infradead.org>
References: <20070909202527.GT3563@stusta.de>
	<20070909203920.GA11764@infradead.org>
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On Sun, 9 Sep 2007 21:39:20 +0100 Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 10:25:28PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > sys_{open,read} can finally be unexported.
> 
> Andrew, can you please put this in?  Having these exports for syscalls around
> hsa been a long-time annoyance that can finally be fixed now.

Sure.  But I think it is better to give people some warning when we're
planning on breaking out-of-tree things.  I do occasionally receive reports
of "hey, the X driver which I get from Y doesn't work any more".  Often
it's open-source stuff, too.  I see no point in irritating our users more than
we need to.

If we're changing an API or removing a function then there's nothing we can
do, but in the case where we're simply deleting an export, it's exceedingly
easy for us to EXPORT_UNUSED_SYMBOL (and __deprecated_for_modules?) for a
few months.

Adrian knows this, yet he habitually sends zero-warning export-removal
patches and I habitually ignore them.  I guess we must both enjoy this or
something.
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